Is the Entertainment World Finally Burying ‘Blackface’?

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.

Aleksandrs Antonenko in the title role of Otello

This week, the
Metropolitan Opera ended its long-standing practice of having singers
who play the ‘Moor’ Othello in Verdi’s opera Otello
(Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko in this production), wear
blackface, a burnt cork type of makeup to make white men appear as
African-Americans or, in this case, a North African Moor. The Met is
the most influential opera company in the world and perhaps its
historic move will influence all opera companies to do the same and,
finally, bury the disgraceful racial usage of blackface.

The end of blackface
at the Met comes after the murder of nine innocent parishioners in a
church in Charleston, South Carolina, the deaths several African
Americans at the hands of white police officers and the removal of
the Confederate flag in front of the South Carolina statehouse. And
now the blackface makeup kits have been tossed into the garbage can
at the Met.

The history of
blackface in American entertainment goes all the way back to the
1840s, when traveling minstrel shows became popular. The shows used
all white casts. The singers would don blackface (burnt cork,
greasepaint or shoe polish) and then appropriate (a wonderful word
for steal) African-American songs and dances for their white show.
The men would then dance across the stage, white bodies, black faces
and white gloves on their now black hands (many wore wooly black
wigs, too). Audiences in the 1840s, and for decades after, loved it.
The movies did the same when they arrived in 1903. Film companies
hired all white casts and had some of them put on blackface to play
black roles. In movies, the blackface often looked crude, like
someone had fallen into a puddle of mud. In The
Birth of a Nation, hundreds of white actors
and actresses wore blackface and portrayed blacks as fools, thugs and
outright rapists.

Film producers, stage
moguls and opera heads all used the same defense. They would not hire
black performers because of racism and so they made white performers
appear to be black. Why not?

Did people mind? Few.
That was a time of ingrained racism in America and white audiences
just shrugged about blackface. Black audiences raged about it but at
the turn of the century nobody paid any attention to them – they
were blacks and had no standing.

Blackface, like the
Confederate flag, was always a sign of racism and it was not subtle,
either. Blackface performers in film, and on stage, denigrated not
just the African Americans, but white entertainers who became black.
Blackface was always a slap in the face to blacks, but to whites in
the audience, too. They were the majority in the country and they
were people who could tolerate blackface? They could have protested
and protested mightily, but did not.

Blackface persisted in
vaudeville and was accepted in the Broadway theater world (black
entertainer Bert Williams wore blackface so that he could look
‘black’) as well as in film. Black characters such as Jim Crow,
Rastus, Zip Coon, Mammy, Uncle Tom, Buck, Sambo and all the
Pickaninnies sadly became household names. Right up through the
1940s, there was blackface in film, topped by Bing Crosby leading the
cast of Holiday Inn in
the musical number ‘Abraham,’ about Abraham Lincoln.

The
only roles real black actors were given were generally those of
servants. One of the great lines was from Hattie McDaniel, who won an
Oscar for playing Mammy in Gone with the
Wind.” A few years later, asked about
playing a maid’s role in a film, she said with great dignity, “I’d
rather play a maid than be one.”

Blackface
reared its ugly head on television in 1951 when the wildly successful
blackface radio show Amos ‘n Andy
debuted starring white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. The
NAACP had more clout then and the organization campaigned against the
show relentlessly for two years, finally convincing its sponsor.
Blatz Beer, to drop its support. The show soon went off the air.

Some
television networks have cut blackface scenes from movies. American
Movie Channel (AMC) did that three years ago, snipping Crosby’s
‘Abraham’ song from Holiday Inn.

From time to time, in
movies, television and cartoons, there has been some blackface but
far fewer incidents than in previous decades. Who needs blackface
anyway? The country has thousands of gifted black entertainers,
Hispanic entertainers and Asian entertainers who are happy to play
themselves. The rest of America is happy to appreciate their work and
cheer them on.

Whenever someone wears
blackface, such as Dancing with the Stars
alum Julianne Hough, who donned blackface and braided her hair as a
pickaninny at a 2013 Halloween party to appear to be recent Emmy
award winner Uzo Aduba’s character Crazy Eyes in Orange
Is the New Black, they jeered from coast to
coast. Thousands of people screamed at Kylie Jenner for appearing as
a black woman in a French magazine photo shoot. A recent production
of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The
Mikado was severely criticized for having
four white actors play Asians. Ted Danson was sharply chastised for
appearing in blackface at a Friars Club roast way back in 1993.
People will simply no longer tolerate the shameful practice and those
who swim in the cesspool to do it.

In entertainment, a role
is a role. In the new Broadway musical, Hamilton,
an Hispanic actor plays Alexander Hamilton, black actors play James
Madison and Aaron Burr and the lily-white Schuyler sisters are played
by white and black actresses. Nobody cares.

It was time for the
Confederate flags to be brought down and it is now time for blackface
to dance and sing its way off stage, too.